This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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‘Felix and Meira’ Reaches Into a Cloistered World — and Beyond
Five years ago, at the Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan, I saw the worst movie about Hasidim ever made. “Holy Rollers,” a tale of Brooklyn boychiks gone bad, starred Jesse Eisenberg as Sam Gold, an innocent young thing who gets sucked into the ecstasy smuggling business. The plot was based on a true story, but the…
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Cut and Paste Your Ancestors
In need of Jewish ancestors? Liana Finck has some for you — just cut out and display! CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE
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Music Stanford Student Slams ‘Anti-Semitic’ Question About Jewish Faith
(j weekly via JTA) — A junior at Stanford University who is running for the student senate says she faced anti-Semitic questioning from a student group whose endorsement she was seeking. During a March 13 interview in front of eight members of the university’s Students of Color Coalition, Molly Horwitz, 21, alleges that the lead interviewer…
The Latest
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Heard the One About the Jewish Musical That’s Better Than You’d Think?
Have you heard the one about the Jewish mother so bulldozing that her husband and daughters try hard to stay out of her path? About the Jewish father proud at his daughter’s wedding, but mostly because of the great deal he got on the banquet hall? About the Waspy machetayneste-to-be who sips gin at breakfast,…
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Pot Seder Aims To Put Legalization on the Passover Table
(JTA) — This seder included a legal disclaimer. “The cannabis products at this Seder are available to OMMP cardholders only,” the sign at the check-in table read, referring to the state of Oregon’s medical marijuana program. “All others consume at your own risk.” The fine print explained the facts: While Oregon voters legalized recreational marijuana…
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Let’s Get Honest About Gunter Grass
It has already started. In the obituaries for the late German novelist Günter Grass, he has been cast as “the writer who stirred Germany’s conscience,” “the conscience of Germany,” and “the conscience of his generation.” Grass looks set for canonization, but his place in German literary and political history should still be a matter of…
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‘The King’ and Us
“It is a puzzlement,” as Yul Brynner used to crow onstage, how Rodgers and Hammerstein, two American Jewish musical theater titans who promoted ethnic and racial tolerance, created such an insensitive spectacle as 1951’s “The King and I.” Now in its umpteenth Broadway revival, the musical comedy purports to show the historical figure of King…
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The Secret Idealism of My Grandma Rose of Texas
Grandma Rose, aka Texas Rose, was mean until the day she died. She was as stingy with love as she was with money, and saved her greatest affection for the San Antonio Spurs, hats with sparkly rhinestones, and anything that could be categorized as a good deal. Even into her 90s, she started each day…
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Of Neiman Marcus, Kinky Friedman and 12 Other Things About (Jewish) Texas
1) 158,505 Jews live in Texas. 2) The state’s first Jewish cemetery was established in Galveston in 1852. 3) Texas’s first Jewish congregation, Congregation Beth Israel, was founded in Houston in 1859. 4) Abraham Neiman and Stanley Marcus founded the Neiman Marcus department store in Dallas in 1907. 5) Olga Bernstein Kohlberg opened Texas’s first…
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Let Our Judaica Go!
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what we know and how we know it, or, to put a fancy name to it, the processes by which academic disciplines are constituted and knowledge is organized. The more I mull, the more it seems to me that serendipity, curiosity and passion are key components of that…
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Was Our Greatest Composer-Critic an Unrepentant Anti-Semite?
Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940-1954 By Virgil Thomson Library of America, 1,200 pages, $45 Kansas City, Missouri-born composer Virgil Thomson is called “America’s greatest composer-critic” in this collection, which addresses the issue of Thomson’s relationship with rival Jewish composers. Brought up in a Southern Baptist family in Missouri, Thomson produced some admirable works such as…
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